We are discovering some real steals in our new series of boats under £10,000 – Affordable Classics

You need a good excuse for a blog title as offensively pretentious as that, but I’ve got one. I’ve just returned from Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, a regatta with 4,000 sailors on classic yachts, thoroughbred racers and to add a frisson of Med bad taste, a fleet of Wallys.

The regatta is known among regular participants for the fairly wild antics that take place in the apres-sail. The Classic Boat team, admirably restrained in the circumstances, did witness one or two minor indiscretions, but really, the sight for sore eyes (and heads) is on the water.

The Centenarian’s Race, organised by the Gstaad Yacht Club on the Thursday of the event, saw us join Owl, a magnificent 1909 gaff ketch designed by Fred Shepherd and well-known in the Med as a charter yacht, and also in the USA, where she visited in the 1990s before taking part in the 2001 America’s Cup Jubilee in Cowes.

Forgetting two small screens below the cockpit coaming, there really isn’t much to say Owl isn’t as she was ten decades ago. Owl is pretty special and she is sailed today virtually double-handed by a French couple, Jacques Salemme and Laurence Molina (below).

It’s rare that you sail with people like these two, totally at one with their charge. We share a drop of cool rosé in the cockpit afterwards, communicating in rusty French (thankyou to impromptu translator Carole Fisset) about a memorable day.

The next morning normal class racing resumes and I take a RIB over to nearby Port Grimaud, to join Havsornen, recently bought by Philippe Fabre and his wife Caroline. The Fabres have notched up some serious palmares on their Spirit of Tradition sloop Freya, and the Freya crew is manning the new boat.

The mighty Havsornen is a different beast, but these guys are a slick team. We start ahead of our main rival today, the recently restored Blitzen (CB cover boat in August) and with the Fabre team well in control of their new steed, there’s not much to do except sit on the rail and gawp at the awesome spectacle.

A proliferation of masts as thick as during the Round the Island Race is around us, a discombobulating rendezvous of the most modern and vintage.
A Wally superyacht glides past, tinted windows and massive black sails sucking all the sunlight out of the afternoon.

Right on her tail comes Elena, the 1910 Herreshoff schooner, showing all the pace that won her the 1928 Transatlantic Race, and bucketloads more class.

A 30-square metre darts up behind them, no more than an arrow with a rig attached, and keeping pace with boats far bigger.

I’m about to put my camera away when scything through the swell comes the bow of the 12-M, France. A helicopter hovers low overhead, cameramen hanging out to catch the spectacle below.

What else could we be treated to? A lone Solent Sunbeam ploughs into the deep blue rollers, a long way from home and cutting quite a dash, even in this company.

Truly, Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez is a staggering sight. The bay is known for being either totally windless or blowing a hoolie, but on a good day, it is hard to beat.

“These old boats have been around,” someone said to me once. How true. The classic world is peppered with instances of someone unexpectedly seeing that ‘yacht from my childhood’ and getting all dewy eyed. Outsiders might wonder what makes us get emotional about a technical construction of wood, rope and a few other materials, particularly one that can induce such incomparable suffering at sea, but we all know it can.

I was in Mystic Seaport in June last year, standing on the deck of a 1950s Cheoy Lee ketch restored by Gannon & Benjamin, when someone on the quay exclaimed loudly: “Well damn! My friend owned this boat back in the 1960s!”

He hadn’t seen the boat since and was delighted to see her in such pristine condition.

Following our feature on the restored yacht Nin-dar-Anna (pictured above) in our May 2017 issue, we received a letter saying: “Your May issue brought me astonishing news. It was a joy for me to see the portrait of that elegant yacht that my husband Theodore Jones and I once owned. What good news it is to hear that ‘our’ boat has had a new lease on life.”

Similarly, my mum nearly fell off her chair when she opened a copy of Classic Boat some time ago, spotting an article on a yacht she’d sailed as a 20-year-old. It turned out the boat was now owned by Classic Boat writer Dick Durham. A small world indeed.

Dick himself had a serendipitous moment when he sailed on a boat called Lona III, featured in our September 2017 issue. Feeling a strange affinity for the yacht, as he joined the owner over two days’ east coast cruising, he realised suddenly that he’d last sailed her as a teenager, in the same waters.

This summer my colleague on Classic Boat, Steffan Meyric Hughes, spent a long weekend with his family on Spark of Light, one of the first hireboats built by Herbert Woods on the Broads. How many thousands of hireboaters will have fond memories of her?

A wooden yacht, even one built on a 1950s production line like Spark of Light, has character. If owned, it becomes part of the family, but even if we are simply watching from afar, following the fortunes of a famous classic, we can easily feel we’ve grown up with it and we delight to see the boat back afloat and well looked after.

Among the big projects coming up for completion in the next year or so are a Fife 12-Metre, a big Nicholson ketch out in Japan, a Mylne in New England and a schooner in Russia – each of them, no doubt, giving rise to more emotional reunions.

Throughout our time in New England, people told us how special Maine was. They’d pause, almost comically, look into the distance and with a shake of the head, say: “Yep, Maine’s pretty special.” We witnessed this in New York, in Mystic, in Newport, in Cape Cod. We began to wonder, how special could one place be?

And people had raised their eyebrows at the idea that we were driving to Maine for just two days. A footwell of empty coffee cups and some indeterminate number of hours on the road later, we understood why. Maine is a drive away, but what a drive. One rolling road up the coast, thick forest stretching away over the hills and immaculate settlements of white wooden homes adorned by ubiquitous US flags. With a bag of apple fritters at hand and discussing with some relish the boat building gold ahead, the miles passed by very happily.

Walking up the wooden steps into the main shed at Brooklin Boat Yard and there’s lead boatbuilder Brian Larkin, blasting into the story of how he came here for one summer as a youngster and is still here building boats 30 years later.

Botin 22m in build

The narrative continues as he gestures us over to the big project ongoing at Brooklin, the Botin 22m, a boat that will break new ground in the modern-classic stakes and is at an interesting state of half-build, composite epoxy/foam/wood construction exposed for our inspection.

Up comes Eric Blake, sawdust-infused t-shirt and iron handshake. We’re among wooden boat A-listers here. With yard boss Steve White, these are the guys who’ve led some of the biggest projects to hit the classic world over the last couple of decades. The new build of the 92ft yawl Bequia and W-Class Wild Horses (first and second in the Candy Store Cup this year), the restoration of the 1913 P-Class Olympian, restoration of the 74ft Purdy motor yacht Aphrodite and of the 1926 Herreshoff S-Class Mischief, the build of the Frank Gehry-styled Foggy. The names trip off the tongue, all boats we’ve read about or admired on a pontoon somewhere. Suffice to say, when Eric and Brian talk, we listen.

A day later and we pull up in Belfast, around the other side of Penobscot Bay. We’re visiting the mighty Front Street Shipyard, a name that is best known in the superyacht world and whose bread and butter, if you can call it that, is building and refitting some of the most massive boats afloat.

Front Street Shipyard

The yard, with towering aircraft hangar sheds, was set up five years ago on the site of a former sardine cannery. The waters of the Passagassawakeag River were red, we’re told, as the poor old sardines met their fate. Now things are fairly different, as 150ft multi-deck megayachts motor in from all over the world for the Front Street treatment. We meet the man in charge of it all, JB Turner, who is generous enough to stop and chat despite being in the midst of some ‘interesting’ build discussions. JB is the kind of boss who if a client called up asking how their boat was doing, he’d probably answer from underneath it. He exudes ‘hands-on’. He also exudes an air of unflappability that wouldn’t blink if a tank was coming his way. Which, for a man taking care of some of the biggest privately owned boats afloat, is probably quite useful.

Todd French at the helm of Webfoot

We’re in Camden, home of the new Camden Classics Cup, home of boatbuilding history too plentiful to mention, home of a damn fine coffee shop, Zoot. Suitably breakfasted and down at the marina, we are waved aboard Webfoot, a brand new motor boat built by French & Webb. The man waving us aboard is Webfoot’s owner, who was inspired to commission the boat based on French & Webb’s lengthy CV building and restoring wooden classics, most recently the impressive job on the NY40 Marilee. At the helm today is the man who oversaw that project, Todd French, who takes us out of Camden’s glorious harbour all too soon. This is a place one could return to and spend several lifetimes mooching about the shores and coastline.Webfoot is a handsome machine and she’s comfortably fitted out below, with two cabins and all the overnight cruising facilities a family trip could require. But she’s not some fancy motorboat. This is a machine inspired by the yacht that the owner sailed when his family were young. The name is the same, many of the fittings are the same. But more that just features, she’s seamanlike. There are seamanlike boats built all over the world, but here were are in the land that promotes the legend of ‘Maine-built boats’. If Webfoot is anything to go by, the legend is in good hands.With an overnight flight from Boston Logan ahead of us, we drive south again. Rolling through that thick wooded landscape, our route lined by immaculate white homes, neat lawns and plenty of expert boat-building yards we haven’t yet had time to meet, the conclusion is obvious: Maine’s pretty special.

The William Fife cutter Mariquita, is a good example of the problems of measuring length. Her bowsprit and boom overhang give her a LOS greater than her LOA (or LOD) and her waterline length varies considerably with heel angle.

A short note on boat length

“What’s the quickest you’ve ever been under sail?” asks Lloyd Thornburg as we climb on board his RIB at Trinity Landing in Cowes.

“About 12 knots, for a few seconds once, and it was a complete fluke, coming down a wave,” is the general consensus among the cruising sailors assembled.

Phaedo3 off Cowes

“We’ll see if we can get you up to 30 today,” replies Lloyd.

A minute later and we’re being hauled onto the leeward hull of Phaedo3, Lloyd’s MOD70 trimaran. This is not a classic yacht. The MOD70 is about as extreme as you get in sailing. Phaedo3 has a beam of 55ft (16.8m), deep fins give her a draft of 14ft 9in (4.5m), she has a mast height of 95ft (29m) and she weighs around 6.5 tons. The hull, perhaps needless to say, is a carbon fibre/foam sandwich. Sails are by North, battle-scarred and black.

For a bunch of guys who just spent a day and a half going 36 knots, Lloyd and crew look pretty fresh. They’re back in Cowes after smashing the round Ireland record, competing the circumnavigation that takes most cruising sailors an entire summer in 36 hours and 52 minutes.

A month earlier they wowed the Solent with a display of pure speed around the Isle of Wight that took half an hour off Ben Ainslie’s record of 2013.

These guys make history just about every time they hook up with the right weather system and it’s no surprise to find on board today Brian Thompson, one of most experienced multihull sailors alive, along with a group of bronzed sailing athletes that include the UK’s Sam Goodchild, one of the upcoming stars of the offshore sailing world.

They couldn’t be friendlier, but there is one piece of advice that is repeated: “Do hang on.”

We are guests of Musto, here to promote their upcoming AW16 Evolution range and also promoting the undeniable fact that Musto prototypes are tested by top sailors all over the world, ranging from Lloyd and team on Phaedo3 (Lloyd likes Musto so much he buys all the Phaedo3 kit himself), to Ian Walker and his Volvo Ocean Race crew, to ice-sailors somewhere way up north.

Testing Musto’s kit at the World Ice Sailing Champs 2016

We drop our mooring line and begin nosing upwind. Without even trying, we’re doing 4 knots, a half respectable cruising speed for many yachts.

Then the crew hauls out the headsail – and our speed over ground goes from 4 to 15 in no more than two seconds. As the sail is trimmed and we get into a groove, Phaedo3 is up to 25 knots before you’ve blinked. High up on the windward hull, watching the Solent drift by below, I feel like I’m in an open version of the Red Jet. You know it’s fast, but it doesn’t feel outlandish. In these conditions, there’s no spray and we can communicate easily.

Middle hull flying!

Brian points out a gust on the water ahead and Lloyd helms straight for it. When we hit, she jolts forward as if someone pinched her bum – and keeps on going. The acceleration is breathtaking and the netting between the hulls begins to sound like a line dancing club as we whoop and holler like kids.

“The amazing thing is, though,” I bellow into someone’s ear, “is that she feels so safe.”

And then a real gust hits. The middle hull flies free, the rig fairly reverberates and we are up to 32 knots, just like that. These guys have been sustaining speeds higher than this for days on end. I guess you just get used to it, but the idea of doing this right through the night is terrifying.

Down below the décor of choice is black carbon – unpainted to save weight – with a smell of diesel that doesn’t do my stomach any good. Four can sleep down here if they wish, but really, it’s quite unpleasant. What these guys need is some wood panelling, two 1920s lamps and a decent chart table.

SOG 27 knots. When we went over 30 I wasn’t waving my phone around so much

Back on deck, we turn around at Calshot and head back to Cowes. We’re against the tide and conditions are choppy. Getting into the marina on a normal yacht might take an hour or more. Phaedo3 delivers us back to dry land in about 10 minutes.

It terms of sheer performance, this was as sensational an experience as I’ve had on a boat.

But what I wasn’t doing as I sat there on the trampoline watching the water skimming by 25ft beneath me, was thinking of the boat’s history, its former owners, what it did in the war!

I wasn’t admiring the the woodworking, the varnish, or having that moment thinking about history stretching back, looking at the mast and thinking about Nicholson himself leaning against it as he puffed on his pipe. And all the other gumph that goes through my head when I sail on a really fascinating old yacht.

Unlike the great classics of our time, Phaedo3 and its ilk are here today and gone tomorrow. When they’re here, though, they are really here. Wow.

We head north to Newport, where a cool onshore breeze is a welcome relief after the blazing heat of Mystic and a forest of masts guides us from our hotel to Newport Shipyard. Newport is where yachting history meets yachting modernity, in fairly jaw-dropping style. On the pontoons today we pass the new J-Class Topaz, the carbon speed machine of the moment Comanche (awaiting an attempt on the transat record), a healthy smattering of superyachts, a Carriacou sloop, a 12-M and an all-black Spirit of Tradition dayboat, Gotham, built by French & Webb that you’d happily kill close relatives for. At the shipyard entrance, Ranger is up on the hard and in a shed at the back is Hanuman, having work done prior to the big J regatta in Bermuda next year. In terms of the range of boat porn on show, Newport is pretty hard to beat.

We’re here to meet Donald Tofias, a former commercial property dealer and lifetime sailor who is the man behind the W-Class, a range of Spirit of Tradition boats that has been making waves on the classic scene for almost 20 years. The best known ‘W’ is Wild Horses, which is also on the pontoons here, a 76-footer built at Brooklin Boat Yard that Donald campaigns with a crew of young sailors. Nurturing young talent is part of the W-Class programme and over the years Donald has had thousands of youngsters working on Wild Horses and her sister yacht White Wings, racing at Antigua and other big regattas. Many of those crew are now professional skippers and one of them, apparently, skippers a J.

But we’re not sailing on Wild Horses. After an alfresco breakfast at harbourside Belle’s Café – Donald knows the waitresses and the chefs by name – we walk round the quay to an immaculate Spirit of Tradition day boat, designed by Stephens, Waring & White and built five years ago at Brooklin Boat Yard as the W-37. Race Horse is a head-turner, even in Newport, with a huge, clean deck area, carbon mast painted tan, laminated teak bowsprit giving her 43ft LOA, vanilla dacron square-headed mainsail, and a cold-moulded four-layer wooden hull that draws on 19th century sandbaggers and New York City harbour pilots as inspiration. It’s a heady mix of cutting-edge and yesteryear that doesn’t come cheap – $599,000 for Race Horse herself if you’re interested. If you baulk at the price, Donald says laconically, you try and build one cheaper.

Skipper Nat Wilson guides us out of an awkward berth and with three W-Class crew to make the day easy, sails are up and we’re out sailing in minutes.

Newport Harbour is a trip through the classic yachting archives, old America’s Cup yachts raising sails while schooners pass and a clutch of Stars racing to weather in the Barcardi regatta. Up on the hill is Hammersmith Farm, childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy. On the other side of the Atlantic we have Cowes and Osborne House, but the thought crosses my mind that the Solent might not be the centre of the yachting universe after all.

Today we’re treated to what Newporters call their natural air-con, a prevailing south-south-westerly, more than enough to fill the 886 square foot of sail and give us a very respectable speed over the ground, but the hiking straps we don’t need. Donald says the right owner would be an ‘athletic’ sailor – Race Horse can be a physical boat. “I wanted that,” Donald says. Our host is remarkably entertaining company. The day passes with a steady drawl of anecdotes and observations ranging from the sage to the outrageous. It’s not for nothing that Donald is known as a raconteur. He has you gripped describing what he ate for breakfast. With a skull pendant round his neck, sun cream applied with admirable insouciance and a distinctly colourful wardrobe, he cuts a dash to say the least.

As does the boat. With the assymetrical spinnaker up, we’re matching windspeed
(upwind we’d had 9 knots in 15 knots of breeze). The tiller is as responsive as a Laser, but she’s not flighty, and the wide platform makes for a steady world for helm and crew. If you want sofas on both sides, you can have them, and you’ll watch the Newport sun go down in some style, but today we’re stripped back for performance. In this kind of wind, she was never going to be planing, but small adjustments to the helm and mainsail trim translate into speed gained or lost.

Back in the shipyard, Donald leaves us with skipper Nat and his crew, ice cold teas and lobster rolls all around at Belle’s. On the pontoon over the water sits a line of superyachts. Give me the W-37 any day.

Two years after it was released, I finally got a chance to see Vanishing Sail, at a screening at the WoodenBoat Show at Mystic a few weeks ago.

This is the film shot by fashion photographer Alexis Andrews, a sailor and classic boat enthusiast who like many people fell in love with the Carriacou sloops, built on a beach on the Caribbean island that gave the boats their name.

Andrews, however, went further than mere admiration from afar. He owned one of the boats and every summer for years would sail it back to Carriacou to its birth place, spending time with the man who built it, Alwyn Enoe.

What Andrews found was a great tradition, passed down the generations from Scottish settlers who sailed there centuries ago. But with Enoe as the only Carriacou boat builder left, it was a tradition that was dying out.

He set out to document it.

The filming took five years and followed many ups and downs in Enoe’s efforts to build one final sloop with his sons. Andrews has shot the story beautifully, as sensitive to his subjects as he is clearly admiring of their knowledge and application. Certainly, no boat builder will ever complain about uncomfortable yard conditions after seeing some of the industrial methods employed on Carriacou.

The desperately long-winded means of collecting the necessary timber, log by painful log, to plank the boat, is perhaps one of the film’s most memorable scenes.

The build up to the climactic arrival at Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, where the beach-built newcomer goes head to head with some of the great classic yachts of our time, is story-telling at its best. The audience reaction when I saw it in Mystic, some with tears in their eyes, was by all accounts the same reaction that has greeted the film all over the world. It has won awards at multiple film festivals.

Andrews has created a wonderful document of traditional boat building at its most intuitive.

The DVD is available through the Vanishing Sail website and meanwhile the first screening on the UK south coast is being held on Sunday, August 6, in the atmospheric surrounds of Portsmouth Historic Naval Dockyard.

Tom Cunliffe will be on stage to introduce the film and there will be a Q&A with the director afterwards. It’s the biggest cinema screen on the south coast – not one to miss.

There are different categories all centred around preserving maritime heritage.

The Classic Boat prize goes to the best image of a classic yacht.

The winners this year were presented their prizes by HRH The Princess Royal, at a ceremony at Trinity House in London.

London-based photographer Sophie Hunt took Haul Together at Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez.

She says: “It was taken while racing on Veronique, a 75ft gaff yawl built in 1907 by Luke & Co in the Hamble.

“I am very lucky to crew on her in some of the Med regattas and look forward to breezy conditions to capture exhilarating action shots.

“This photo was taken on a particularly gusty day and on an iPhone 6! Criminal I know, for a photographer, but I have to say, for these in-the-moment shots, sometimes you just have to snap away with what you have on you!”

As Sophie says, photography is all about opportunism and having an eye for the composition, but usually you’ll find her ‘tinkering’ with her Leica.

You can follow Sophie’s marine portfolio on Instagram @pinkfoxstudiomarine

Has the British marine industry quietly been re-inventing its heritable past for the new century?

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Classic Boat is the magazine for the world’s most beautiful boats. Packed with stunning images, we have the inside stories of the great classic yachts and motorboats afloat today, as well as fascinating tales from yesteryear and the latest from the wooden boat building scene around the world.